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Lauren Carroll Harris
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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American Factory (2019) |
It's the kind of astonishing story that could serve as the dramatic spine of an alternate history novel... - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Sep 25, 2019
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(undefined) |
Getting smart, interesting young artists to tell personal stories about being Australian and Muslim proves a powerful device for cutting through the fearful rhetoric of the Muslim as an imagined bad guy - Guardian
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| Posted Aug 05, 2019
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Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (2018) |
Hannah Gadsby spins her own life story into a clever, raging and confronting spiel against misogyny, homophobia and even the tired old tropes of comedy itself. - Guardian
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| Posted Aug 05, 2019
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Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) |
Dawson City: Frozen Time's most intense quality is its richness, both visually and historically. - RealTime
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| Posted Aug 01, 2019
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(undefined) |
The show wisely, and slyly, toggles between apocalyptic political warnings, wry warmth and a truly idiosyncratic sense of humour. - Guardian
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| Posted Jul 24, 2019
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Ellen DeGeneres: Relatable (2018) |
With this slickly produced 70-minute standup special, Netflix continues its glittering and sometimes subversive lineup of smart, kooky comedy. - Guardian
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| Posted Jul 24, 2019
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Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé (2019) |
At the glittering centre of it all is Beyoncé herself: master maker of her own modern myth; an uber-perfectionist capitalist surveying her multimedia empire. - Guardian
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| Posted Jul 23, 2019
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Acute Misfortune (2018) |
[It] explores both the destructive masculinity upon which Cullen built his personal mythology, and the way Australian culture romanticises blokey dysfunction. - Kill Your Darlings
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| Posted Jun 03, 2019
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Dragonfly Eyes (2017) |
Despite the narrative abstraction and exposed artifice of the film's construction, Xu's creation feels creepily alive-because it is. - The Baffler
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| Posted Jun 03, 2019
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Let the Sunshine In (2017) |
Stay open to life, never close down. To me, Let The Sunshine In seems a great film. - Kill Your Darlings
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| Posted May 01, 2019
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Vox Lux (2018) |
I suspect, however, that Corbet's aims are actually more modest than many critics have credited: to create a fun, irony-drenched visual story that skips through a frenzied life with the rhythm of a video clip. - Kill Your Darlings
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| Posted Feb 22, 2019
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The Other Side of the Wind (2018) |
Welles and his collaborators have made an almost weightless film of ellipses and shards; as the camera ricochets at surprising angles and scenes slide into one another, the project recalls the energy and dynamism of Jean-Luc Godard. - Guardian
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| Posted Nov 09, 2018
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The Second (2018) |
...the plotline unfolds with such a lack of clarity that it is hard to know what The Second saying about the sexual power, or disempowerment, of teen girls. - Australian Book Review
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| Posted Jul 05, 2018
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Brothers' Nest (2018) |
It's quite touching, in a demented way, despite the feeling that the script could have dug deeper and more drolly into the moral ambiguity of toxic bonds, family trauma, and parental failure. - Australian Book Review
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| Posted Jun 20, 2018
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Tully (2018) |
The finest moments of Tully play like an insight to this female future of storytelling. - The Monthly (Australia)
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| Posted Jun 08, 2018
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I, Tonya (2017) |
Neither Gillespie nor writer Steven Rogers has the sensibility to lucidly, subtly navigate the black comedic tone for which they reach. - The Monthly (Australia)
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| Posted May 11, 2018
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Unsane (2018) |
Its stalker logic feels real and converges its form with its content: medical industry connivances conspire with the perversion of romantic love - Kill Your Darlings
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| Posted May 03, 2018
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Human Flow (2017) |
An ambitious amalgam of artist's film and political documentary, Human Flow is a grand meditation on how to cut through political apathy with solidarity and visual metaphor. - The Monthly (Australia)
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| Posted Mar 30, 2018
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Mary Magdalene (2018) |
The problem with the film's "humanist" approach is that it's too... human-scaled. The result is a film made without magic or sublimity, in which reverence is replaced by diligence. - The Neighbourhood Paper (Australia)
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| Posted Mar 08, 2018
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The Post (2017) |
Still, it's to his credit that Spielberg fleshes out what the revelations of these papers meant for the US at the time. - The Neighbourhood Paper (Australia)
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| Posted Jan 10, 2018
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Wonder Wheel (2017) |
Autobiographical readings can be a lazy, obvious way to interpret the work of an artist, but with its triangular love affairs with stepdaughters and lost women in distress, it is impossible to read Wonder Wheel as anything but. - Australian Book Review
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| Posted Dec 07, 2017
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The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) |
Lanthimos is a surgical filmmaker of great opacity. He offers few signposts as to his characters' motivations, or his film's broader meanings - it's up to Farrell and Kidman to play the subtext. - The Neighbourhood Paper (Australia)
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| Posted Nov 16, 2017
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Three Summers (2017) |
A feel-good film about racism? Okay. - Australian Book Review
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| Posted Nov 02, 2017
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The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017) |
The tone here is more sweet than bitter, affectionately neurotic and channelling the idea of continued love through fractious bonds. - Guardian
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| Posted Oct 09, 2017
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Nocturama (2016) |
Though director Bertrand Bonello's exacting vision of a Parisian terror plot is as stylised and tensely structured as a psychological thriller, the drama plays out with unnerving realism. - Guardian
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| Posted Oct 09, 2017
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Killing Ground (2016) |
I can't help but think that Killing Ground leans on the concept of spiritual comeuppance for Indigenous genocide as a potent but lazy background theme with which to bolster an otherwise rote narrative and set of filmmaking choices. - Kill Your Darlings
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| Posted Sep 06, 2017
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A Ghost Story (2017) |
I feel real love for this film and its lost wandering creature. - The Neighbourhood Paper (Australia)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2017
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Joe Cinque's Consolation (2016) |
Perhaps it's not possible to translate the gonzo narrator, leading us into a dark-edged forest and getting lost with us, to cinema. Perhaps the material really cried out for a documentary treatment. - Kill Your Darlings
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| Posted Jul 19, 2017
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Lion (2016) |
What Lion does is take a culturally rich story and apply the conventions of middlebrow Western, feel-good cinematic storytelling. - Kill Your Darlings
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| Posted Jul 19, 2017
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Beauty (Skoonheid) (2011) |
Beauty frustrates and disturbs in equal measures. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 19, 2017
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All the Way Through Evening (2011) |
All The Way Through Evening has been crafted with a great deal of affection for its subjects. It's honest and compassionate and yet never falls over the brink into sentimentality. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 19, 2017
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Elena (2011) |
Many people can't abide slow-building subtitled films about relentlessly unhappy people. But closet pessimists like myself and the Cannes judges will find Elena's sense of impending doom oddly satisfying. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 19, 2017
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Casting JonBenét (2017) |
By setting aside an objective notion of the truth, Green's hybrid work is simultaneously more fantastical and closer to the truth than anything made with traditional documentary techniques. - Kill Your Darlings
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| Posted Jul 19, 2017
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Sherpa (2015) |
Cinema is full of representations of the landscape that inspire terror.... Jennifer Peedom's Sherpa is the most recent of that canon: it is a climbing film, an Australian film and a documentary about the deadliest day in Everest's history. - The Lifted Brow
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| Posted Jul 19, 2017
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Leviathan (2014) |
If Leviathan is a masterpiece... it's a masterpiece of political pessimism. The end of history has arrived and it is in post-Soviet Russia. - Adbusters
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| Posted Jul 19, 2017
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Rosewater (2014) |
When it ventures into the more abstract territory of its tortured protagonist's mind, the film is able to show how comedians can be unlikely heroes for serious causes, and how humour and imagination can survive the worst totalitarian attacks. - The Big Issue (Australia)
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| Posted Jul 19, 2017
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War Machine (2017) |
Like the war itself, the film is all over the place, with scenes darting between action filmmaking, comedy and drama. - The Neighbourhood Paper (Australia)
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| Posted Jul 17, 2017
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Notorious (1946) |
One of the film's greatest ironies is that it is one of the muddiest of Hitchcock's films to interpret. - Senses of Cinema
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| Posted Jul 17, 2017
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Okja (2017) |
The first half is weird and tough; until you realised you have to read the film like a fable; it's like a live-action version of Spirited Away where a tough, innocent child goes on a wondrous, painful journey. - Junkee
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| Posted Jun 30, 2017
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Whitney: Can I Be Me (2017) |
What lifts it from the usual half-hagiography/half-takedown, tell-all-doco-made-from-a-distance is its analysis of racism within the US music industry. - Junkee
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| Posted Jun 30, 2017
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I am not your negro (2016) |
What sets this film apart from other political docos is its profound emotionality. - Junkee
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| Posted Jun 23, 2017
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Berlin Syndrome (2017) |
It's not arthouse enough to be arthouse, nor thriller enough to be a thriller. - The Daily Review/Crikey
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| Posted Jun 06, 2017
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The Family (2016) |
The affectless way in which the survivors describe their abuse comes to counterpoint the sometimes histrionic choice of cinematic techniques. - The Daily Review/Crikey
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| Posted Jun 06, 2017
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Summertime (2015) |
La Belle Saison is far from groundbreaking, but perhaps that's where its newness lies: in simply bringing queer women's concerns into mainstream arthouse filmmaking. - Junkee
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| Posted Nov 15, 2016
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Sully (2016) |
This film is one of my favourite mainstream releases this year. - Junkee
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| Posted Nov 15, 2016
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Inferno (2016) |
Hanks' performance could generously be described as contractually obliged, and the film as a whole as a theatrically-released telemovie. - Junkee
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| Posted Nov 15, 2016
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The Neon Demon (2016) |
Although Refn is indeed a deeply unique filmmaker on an aesthetic level, in terms of character, theme and genre he is deeply derivative. - Junkee
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| Posted Nov 15, 2016
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Contemporary Color (2016) |
The moments when Contemporary Colour diverts from the onstage performances and moves to abstraction are the brightest. - Junkee
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| Posted Jun 24, 2016
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Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) |
Linklater's 1980 is a world that's so perfect in its contours, so detailed in its realisation, and quite delightful to inhabit for two hours. - Junkee
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| Posted Jun 24, 2016
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Slow West (2015) |
Slow West utilises a massive arsenal of cinematic techniques shunned by most commercial filmmakers, and shows that an arthouse film can hold both tension and big ideas at once. - Junkee
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| Posted Jan 01, 2016
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